The present disclosure relates to identifying and removing additive noise from a measurement of a signal. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to removing noise by running a plurality of instances of a signal, making a measurement for each instance, and analyzing the measurements to obtain a signal with noise removed therefrom. For example, the methods and systems of the present disclosure may measure power consumption, improve accuracy of a power consumption measurement, and identify sources of noise in a power consumption measurement.
There has been considerable interest in achieving power reduction and improving energy efficiency on a variety of applications, such as lighting, car fuel efficiency, as well as various home or office electrical and electronic devices. This is driven by the desire to save on fuel resources, reduce costs, as well as, in the case of mobile devices, prolong battery and usage time. These savings are achieved through the use of more efficient algorithms and software that may run on such systems as well as new material, improved fabrication and design processes and hardware.
This interest extends to mobile devices. There has been a tremendous increase in focus on managing power consumption in the computer and consumer electronics industry both from the design and management perspective. On mobile devices, such as phones and tables, video and in general multimedia applications tend to be among the most power consuming applications and, given their impact to the battery life of such devices, there is considerable desire in better managing and limiting such power consumption. Mobile phones, for example, now may make decisions about performing certain functions, use more efficient displays, and use improved semiconductor device fabrication processes, to save on power. For instance, a device may dynamically switch among a variety of decoding protocols, dim a display, pause a process, etc. when local processing environments favor resource conservation. The Green MPEG movement is a standardization process for improving efficiency of media encoding, decoding, and presentation. For example, in a decoding process, an underlying processor voltage may be adapted based on a frame's complexity to save energy. In an encoding process, a device may automatically code video at a lower resolution and/or lower frame rate to conserve energy. For media presentation, backlight or supply voltage of a display can be adapted to image content to consume less power.
As part of the ongoing effort for new Green MPEG technologies, it was decided that proponents should try to provide power measurement results for their proposals measured on general purpose mobile/CE devices (e.g. phones, tablets, computers etc). Ideally, power measurements would involve the blocks impacted by the proposal, as well as the impact of the proposal to the overall system. However, unfortunately it is unlikely that most proponents would be able to provide block-specific power measurement results, since the characteristics and format factor of such devices does not permit power measurements directly on such blocks. This implies that commonly, only overall system power measurements would be available.
Relying on overall system power measurements from general purpose devices can be inaccurate. Such these devices may run other background applications/services while the desired operations, e.g. video decoding, are taking place. For example, system resources on a mobile device may be used for communication purposes, file management, email checking, or other Operating System (OS) related applications. Such operations although sometimes may be systematic, are more commonly random and cannot be easily predicted. On the other hand, device specific operations that may be indirectly related to the desired operation, e.g. video post-processing and display, would also likely be taking place. All such operations would basically contaminate the overall system power measurements potentially impacting also the analysis of such measurements.
Although it is possible to reduce the impact of some of these factors to the overall power by adjusting some of the settings of the device, including potentially disabling services (e.g. switch to Airplane mode on a mobile device) and setting the display brightness to its lowest setting, all factors cannot be eliminated. Thus, the inventors perceive a need for measuring how much power is consumed by a particular process and determining a level of accuracy of a power consumption measurement.
In other words, the inventors perceived a need to remove noise from or “denoise” a measurement. Although the concepts described herein use the example of measuring power consumption, the concepts apply as well to measurement of other types of signals expected to suffer from noise or interference that would generally increase (or generally decrease) the measurement.